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With its message, "Washington, July 4, 1776/Lincoln, July 4, 1865/," this ribbon connects the legacy of these two American presidents. Following Lincoln's death in 1865, popular sentiment in the North remembered George Washington as the "Father" and Abraham Lincoln as the "Savior" of the United States. Lincoln was said to have finished what Washington had begun; the founding fathers purposefully avoided the question of slavery as they wrote the American Constitution. They knew that if the Constitution tried to limit or abolish slavery, the southern states would refuse to ratify it, and their efforts at unification would fail. This unresolved issued festered for the next seventy four years until the outbreak of the Civil War. Under Lincoln's leadership, the Union was saved when the North won the so-called "War Between the States."